Individual differences in adult foreign language learning

Brooks, Patricia J.; Kempe, Vera; Donachie, Annemarie

doi:10.1037/e520562012-216

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“…In addition to completing the language-learning sessions, participants also completed a series of tasks to measure individual differences in cognitive abilities (i.e., verbal working memory, nonverbal intelligence, artificial grammar learning). The results for these tasks and their relationship to individual differences in Russian language learning success are reported elsewhere (Brooks, Kempe, & Donachie, 2009). These results are not included here because they do not pertain to the present study's focus on how the increased ending invariance of diminutives affects language learning.…”

Section: Testing Sessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Second Language Learning Benefits from Similarity in Word Endings: Evidence from Russian

2011

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Diminutive derivations (e.g., froggy, bootie) constitute morphophonologically similar clusters of words in child-directed speech and serve as low-level schema for learning morphological regularities. Previous research has demonstrated that by regularizing noun endings, diminutives (e.g., Russian: domik, svechka) facilitate word-boundary identification and the acquisition of inflectional morphology. In this study, adult native speakers of English (N = 77) were exposed to diminutive and simplex transparently gender-marked nouns instantiating Russian case-marking and adjective-noun genderagreement patterns, over six 1-hour language-learning sessions. They were subsequently tested on their ability to extend grammatical patterns to new items and vocabulary recall. Learners showed equivalent learning of the trained phrases containing diminutive and simplex nouns but were more accurate in generalizing morphological patterns to diminutive nouns. Furthermore, learners showed a diminutive advantage in vocabulary retention. By increasing the invariant parts of words, diminutive derivations may reduce the amount of phonological material to be memorized and, subsequently, enhance word learning.The research was supported by grants from Language Learning and PSC-CUNY to P. J. Brooks. We thank Jessica Lee, Rosemarie Marronaro, and Urooj Syed for their assistance with data collection.

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Section: Testing Sessionmentioning

confidence: 99%